[4][5] It is about a white solicitor in Sydney whose seemingly normal life is disrupted after he takes on a murder case and discovers that he shares a strange, mystical connection with the small group of local Aboriginal people accused of the crime.

The film opens with a montage of scenes of daily life in Australia in the 1970s— a rural school in the desert with children playing, the main street of an outback town, a traffic jam in the city— all being affected by unusually adverse weather conditions that suddenly appear.

These include heavy rainfall followed by unusually large chunks of hail breaking through the windows of the school injuring students, a frog infestation, and other anomalies.

Due to internal politics and the eschatological divide between the European settlers and Indigenous people, the circumstances by which he was contacted and retained are unusual in that his law practice is corporate taxation and not criminal defence.

When later introduced to the four accused men, he recognises Lee and begins to sense an otherworldly connection to him and to the increasingly strange weather phenomena besetting the city.

Lee refuses to admit that he is tribal or reveal anything about the murder, but tells Burton that his dreams have meaning because he is Mulkurul; descended from a race of spirits who came from the rising sun bringing sacred objects with them.

In the chaos of the flood, Lee manages to escape from prison to find Burton and take him down through subterranean tunnels under the city which lead to a sacred Aboriginal ritual site.

In the chamber, Burton sees a painting on the ceiling depicting the arrival of European explorers from South America and a calendrical prophecy of a cataclysmic oceanic disaster.

In an interview on the Criterion Collection DVD release, director Peter Weir explains that the film explores the question, "What if someone with a very pragmatic approach to life experienced a premonition?"